Fatherhood at Christmas

In this time when over 70% of African American children, about 50% of Hispanic children, and 30% of causcasian children in America are born out of wedlock, it is always timely to talk about fatherhood since most of these children will be missing the influence of their biological father in their lives and many will never have a significant father influence. A fortunate few will be blessed with an adoptive father who accepts them as his own, which reminds me of Joseph.

J.I. Packer has written in his classic book Knowing God that if he had to sum up the gospel in 3 words he would choose 'adoption through propitiation'. It is our adoption by God into His family that gives us the hope of salvation. How appropriate that Jesus would be similarly accepted by Joseph by adoption into his family.

In the nativity story as told by Luke, we first are told about the annunciation and birth of John the Baptist, which preceeded Jesus' birth. When John was circumcised on the eighth day after his birth he was also given his name, as was the custom. The significance of this name-giving comes through in the story of John.

Fathers in our culture as well as in the Bible have always given their family name to their children. This is taken for granted, but in today's world of fatherless children it can no longer be taken for granted. Sometimes the father is not even known. By providing his name, however, the father takes responsibility for the child and claims the child. This was made more explicit at the circumcision of boys in Biblical times as the father also gave the child his full name and presented him to the Lord as his son.

For John, Zacharias had been stricken dumb at his annunciation due to his doubt and questioning of Gabriel, so he could not give John his name. So, the priests assumed that he would be named after his father and proceeded with this approach until interrupted by Elizabeth, objecting that his name was John. They would not accept this from the mother, however, as the father is the name-giver. They turned to Zacharias and he wrote, 'His name is John!' since he was unable to speak.

This makes the passage about Joseph in Matthew the more meaningful. Joseph had been ready to prepare a divorce from Mary, but an angel visited him to make it clear that he should take her as his wife because this child was of God, not of infidelity. And so in Matt. 1:21 the angel says 'and she will bear a son; and you (my emphasis) will call his name Jesus'; then again in 1:25, 'and she gave birth to a Son; and he (my emphasis) called His name Jesus'.

And so Joseph gave Him the name Jesus, which God had instructed but which required a father to give. So Jesus would be known in this life as the son of Joseph who had taken Him as his own and given Him a name. Father's are , among other things, name-givers. We, too, have been adopted and have been given the name 'sons of God' and 'Christian'. In our culture we tend to focus on Mary and overlook Joseph, as if he were irrelevant. God did not overlook him, but specifically sent an angel to him to make sure this special child had a father, a name-giver. In our day, fathers seem to be increasingly seen as irrelevant. Single mothers can choose in vitro fertilization and start a 'family' with no father at all, just a sperm donor who may even be anonymous. We do this at great peril. Even though Jesus had a divine Father, that Father made sure that He also had an adoptive father on this earth. We best not take that example lightly.

The Founding Fathers

I just finished reading Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow which was not only a very thorough and even handed treatment of Mr. Hamilton but also shed more light on John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Having now read a number of biographies about the founders, including John Adams, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson along with 1776 and Founding Brothers, a fairly consistent set of images of the founders emerges from these books and their various authors. Certainly these were men with feet of clay, and while they were all men of high principles they varied widely on matters of faith, fidelity to their spouses, treatment of their political adversaries, slavery, and more. Many of them, including Hamilton and Jefferson, left their families deeply in debt when they died. Several, including Jefferson, Hamilton and Franklin, had trouble controlling their lusts. Several, including Adams, Hamilton and Jefferson could be vindictive, spiteful, and full of rage in their political dealings. Although he was the least educated, least travelled, and least colorful of the bunch, Washington stands out as the one consistently in control of his temper, his passions, his money, his family life, and his decisions. He was the one most likely to see the strengths and weaknesses of all the other founders. He set the example of freeing his slaves which Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe could not bring themselves to do. After Washington's death, Hamilton seemed to lose some of the self-control and restraint he had showed until then, likely because of the influence Washington had upon him. While not a man making a lot of show of his faith, Washington seems to have been true to the faith. After his death, the partisanship that followed resulted in libel and slander that would more than rival the mud slinging we saw in the recent presidential campaign, which had been much more restrained while Washington remained. Washington stands out in this crowd of founders, not because of his intellect, his writing, his speeches, or even his military campaigns. He stands out primarily for his character and self-mastery. One has to think it was more than just his own personality at work here, that this was indeed the hand of Providence upon him.

The other characters that stand out in these books are Eliza Hamilton and Abigail Adams. The picture of both that emerges are women of serene and strong faith who support, defend, forgive, and encourage their husbands despite the evident failings of those men. They suffer all the slurs that were launched at their husbands and provided refuge and support while taking on much of the load of supporting their family while their husbands focused on the country and were often gone for months at a time. These two were clearly exceptional human beings.

The more one learns about Jefferson, on the other hand, the less one admires him. He is clearly the most disappointing of the founders and the least consistent with his own avowed values on matters of family, morality, freedom, and speaking the truth about his political foes. He and Hamilton emerge as tragic figures, Hamilton dying in a duel as a result of his own overblown sense of 'honor' and Jefferson so consumed by his own selfishness and ambition that he betrays his own lofty writing about freedom to maintain his lifestyle by slaves, consistently hides behind others in his malicious attacks on political foes, sires children by his slave, refuses to recognize the truth about the evil in the French Revolution, and leaves his family deeply in debt upon his death. All of this on top of his confused views of Christianity make Jefferson the most disappointing of the founders.

All of these books put the recent presidential campaigns into context. The personal attacks, the partisanship, the revelations of personal moral character and judgement that are disappointing are nothing new. Let us hope that Providence has a Washington out there somewhere for our time as well.

Negative campaigning...some things never change

I voted today in the runoff election between Saxby Chambliss and Jim Martin, which will help decide whether the Democratic party will get a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate or not. Both candidates ran campaigns that were not only negative, they were downright deceptive and certainly less than straightforward. Both ran ads that reached back many years and ran them with headlines and sound bites that highly distorted what really happened. Neither candidate came across as honest and ethical. The entire campaign on both sides was exceedingly shabby.



I have recently been reading the biography of Alexander Hamilton, and the rumors, intrigues, and outright lies and libels that were written of him by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and their partisans that are discussed in the book seem sadly contemporary in light of the recent political campaign. Hamilton induldged in some of the same things to them in return, of course. As I have read the biographies of Hamilton and John Adams along with Truman, Teddy Roosevelt, Eleanor and FDR, and other books about the Founding Fathers the past couple of years I have been repeatedly reminded how familiar a theme dirty campaigning, falsehoods, vote stealing/buying, and other unethical behaviors have been in elections ever since the 1790's. Our exposure to the current campaigns impresses this upon us for elections in our experience, but it seems that the same behaviors have been common throughout our history. In spite of this, the Founders were able to establish the freedoms we hold dear today and the nation managed to move forward.



With having just had the Thanksgiving holidays a few days ago, besides being thankful for the end of this campaign season, I am thankful that somehow our nation has been guided by Providence despite our many failings and the often unethical and often immoral behavior of our leaders. Let us pray that continues.

Counting the Cost

The financial ‘crisis’ has come as a shock to the world, including me. It probably shouldn’t have been such a shock if we had been better at counting the cost. One of Jesus’ parables is about a man who starts to build a house and runs out of money, winding up a laughingstock for not figuring out ahead of time what he could afford. This market situation is not exactly like that parable but it does raise the question of whether the folks buying financial instruments were paying attention. Worse, it raises questions of whether even those paying attention could figure out what was going on, whether those creating the financial instruments were hiding the cost or believed that counting the cost was no longer necessary because they had 'spread' the risk.
When I look at my own 401k and the mutual funds that I was and still am investing in, I have to say that I was not really well informed on what kind of risks were being taken in the bond and mortgage markets. I did not think the funds I was buying would expose me to a lot of that mortgage risk. I also think that the way the risky loans were packaged made it difficult for most investors to have any real idea of what level of risk they were buying into. To me the biggest concern about all of this is that the financial instruments had been made into instruments such that hardly anyone seems to have had a good understanding of what the risks really were. It is one thing to accept more risk for the potential of a higher payoff; it is quite another not to be able to tell how much risk you are taking. To me this is the biggest issue that is not being addressed: how to make sure that in the future there is clarity of what risks there are in various financial instruments such as ‘bundled’ mortgages.
Meanwhile, ‘buyer beware’ has certainly become the by-word in the market, so much so that no one seems to know whom to trust. That is a big part of the problem with the credit markets. There is still uncertainty about what kind of financial transaction carries what level of risk. I would have been backing away from the stock market had I realized how risky the financial markets had become. However, that risk was very well hidden until the financial markets collapsed. We have all learned that we need much more visibility to risks that are in the market, though it is not yet clear how we are going to be able to get that information in the future.
This market collapse has impacted other things that would not immediately come to mind, like our church’s capital campaign. At the start of the year, long before the financial markets imploded, our elders recommended moving forward on a huge building project. After a lot of information sharing and discussion a vote was taken to approve moving ahead on a capital campaign to raise funds for the project, though as with any large project like this there was a lot of concern about if this was the right time and if the project was too big (at $53 million it was a big project plan). Then the markets imploded right at the time for making pledge commitments. The result was $26 million in pledges and a decision to scale back to do only part of the project, doing more education and gym space but deferring the new auditorium. This seems reasonable to me at this time since we have more options on how to do multiple worship services than on how to provide education and recreation ministry space, and it avoids taking on any more mortgage debt at a time when a loan would be hard to get for a church group anyway. Some are wondering if this means that the elders were wrong in the first place, that they had mis-read God’s will. Perhaps. Or maybe this was just a process God intended to teach us some things. For one thing, during the fund raising process there was a noticeable attendance drop. This made it clear that some folks are there just for the ride and do not really intend to invest in the Lord’s work at this church. I think it may also set a good example of how to live within your means by not taking on more debt at a time when that looks like it is unwise. I think not having the auditorium to make it easy to have just 2 services (one traditional, one contemporary) may also force us to better think about how to do church differently. I was recently in Korea and visited the world’s largest church. To carry out their 7 services on Sunday, they have 3 ‘senior pastors’ that all preach to share the load. Why not start looking to that kind of model sooner that when you get 100,000 people showing up? Why not learn how to have more than one excellent preacher and have preachers learn how to share power rather than requiring a single ‘CEO’ model? I have never liked the idea of a ‘CEO’ model for the church anyway, since CEO’s tend to be autocratic and dictatorial, and those characteristics should be anathema in the church. I think we need to manage risk better in the church as well as in our 401K. We need to be more comfortable with the ‘risk’ of having more than one key preacher at a church. We also need to be sure that our financial stewardship for things like buildings sets the right example for a membership that appears to need that example desperately.

Election Reflections

Irving Kristol once quipped that a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. Someone has said that a 20 year old who is conservative doesn't have a heart, and a 40+ year old who is liberal doesn't have a job. To some degree that is due to having not yet gotten mugged by reality when you are 20.

When you look back to John F. Kennedy, many of his 'liberal' supporters back then are responsible for the conservatism of today. Among the names that immediately come to mind of people who left the Democratic party because it deserted its principles as reflected in folks like JFK and Truman are these: Ronald Reagan, Richard John Neuhaus (author of The Naked Public Square and editor of First Things journal), and Zell Miller in the last election. Joe Lieberman appears to be headed in that direction now. These were supporters of JFK when he said in his inaugural, 'Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty'. They still feel that way (Reagan would if he were alive), but cannot find support for that in the Democratic party. Those who actually carry out this mission for liberty, the armed services, vote overwhelmingly conservative.

Compare that to JFK's assasin, a communist who supported Ho Chi Minh, Mao, and Fidel. Among others who supported those same leftists were current Democrat mainstays like Jane Fonda, Barbara Streisand, and most of Hollywood (if old enough to remember JFK) and the mainstream media. They never quite came to grips with reality since the world they inhabit is a make-believe world. These would never meet any challenge, support any friend, or accept any hardship to assure freedom. They would abandon Israel to its foes just as readily as Iraq. They do their best to impose censorship on talk radio, prevent crisis pregnancy centers from providing an opposing view to abortion, and happily carry out eugenics as did Mao. Despite their kinship to JFK's assasin, they nonetheless claim to be his heirs. If you care to read more on this, see the First Things web site and a blog from May 5, 2006 discussing an article in Commentary magazine entitled 'Lee Harvey Oswald and the Liberal Crack-Up'. Just do a search on 'mugged by reality'. The conclusion of that article is that neoconservatives have much more in common with JFK than today's Democratic party does. Zell Miller reached that same conclusion 4 years ago.

The failure of this election was a failure of ideas. Obama had only to run against Bush, so he did not have to defend his ideas. McCain simply failed to make the ideas the issue. The financial system collapse then overshadowed everything else. However, the ideas of Obama's party will be the problem that we all have to live with even though that never got adequate discussion in the campaign. This would indicate that, for the moment, the Republicans abandoned conservative ideas as well.

As some Jews, like Michael Medved, have realized, conservatives (and especially conservative Christians) are Israel's best friend; conservatives are also freedom's best friends. Those in the Democratic party are relativism's best friends. Since Obama has never actually done anything except run for office, let us hope and pray that when confronted with the real world in the oval office he will quickly get mugged by reality.

Concrete, Steel, and the Gospel

There are a number of things that forcefully strike you as you spend time in Seoul, Korea. On the road one rarely sees a Japanese or American car, but the Hyundai and Kia and Daewoo vehicles are everywhere. Along the river that bisects the city are more bridges than you can keep count of as you drive, and most of them have more than 6 lanes of traffic. The investment in infrastructure like bridges and subways and roads and utilities is enormous and is continuing. To an engineer like me, these things jump out at you immediately.

Even more dramatic, though, is the skyline. While the tallest building in Seoul is 63 stories, certainly not a threat to the now several 100+ story buildings scattered around the world, still the skyline grabs your attention. High rise buildings are everywhere, and the apartment/condo buildings with the resultant population density are amazing. There are literally thousands of 20-30 story apartment buildings in this metro area and many more being constructed. Contruction cranes dot the skyline in every direction. In this metro area of about 20 million, there are hundreds if not thousands of complexes with many buildings, each of which have 10 -20 or more floors and would themselves make a small city. Each has an underground garage for the cars, though the subway system is crowded as well. The amount of concrete and steel already in place as well as under construction makes it easy to see why so much steel, concrete and other construction materials are flowing so strongly to Asia.

I suppose it is this population density that helps explain how a church of 800,000 like Yoido Full Gospel Church can come to be, and there are now several other churches that are over 100,000 each in Seoul. The enormous housing complexes can often house 20,000 or more on a rather small footprint of land. I would expect that a couple of million people live within a very few miles of the Yoido church. While I am not at all used to living this way, this density does seem to foster the development of churches with great impact.

After a week in Seoul, I am VERY ready to return to Roswell, GA, and my suburban house where the population density is a small fraction of Seoul though the traffic might make you think otherwise. Being constantly in a crowd and a traffic jam does weigh on me after a while. I guess I have enough of the ‘country boy’ in me to become stressed by the crowds and hurry when it never lets up. Still, I am amazed at the growth, the infrastructure, and the way the gospel is getting out in Seoul.

The World's Largest Church

While I was in Seoul I had the opportunity to attend worship at the world’s largest church on a Sunday morning. The church, Yoido Full Gospel Church, began shortly after the Korean War in a makeshift army surplus tent with about 5 people. It now has something over 800,000 members across 150 satellite campuses. The main campus is still in the Yoido section of town and has over 100,000 or so attendance on a given Sunday. That includes about 7 worship services for adults and Sunday School for the children during worship. There are about 30,000 children in that number. Each service seats about 12,000 adults. The church is located in a downtown area and is just a few blocks from the seat of government, the National Assembly building. The church owns 5 large buildings downtown, including one for running their daily newspaper which has a readership of about one million. It is, needless to say, quite an operation.

The crowd begins assembling outside the church quite a bit before the worship time arrives. Once the prior service ends, those inside the building all leave so the flow of people is one-way. Then the crowd for the next service streams in, many of them literally running into the auditorium. The crowd turns over very quickly with 24,000 people (12,000 going out and 12,000 going in) handled in about 20 minutes. Besides the folks running into the sanctuary, perhaps the most unusual part of the service to western non-charismatic ears is the prayer time when all 12,000 pray aloud at once. Not in unison, but everyone praying their own prayers aloud at once. I had been used to that as a child in a small church, but not in huge church. It definitely grabs your attention!

The sermon was on how we Christians of all people should be demonstrating hope despite the financial meltdown going on around us. It was in fact a very encouraging sermon and a strong reminder that our hope needs to focused on ultimate things not on our circumstances.
After the service there was a reception for foreigners since the church has lots of visitors. The church is built around home cell groups and that is where the members minister to each other. Those home groups occur any day of the week. The church also operates Prayer Mountain about an hour north of Seoul and not far from the Demilitarized Zone. They have 24-hour prayer there as well as retreats and a center for rehabilitation for both youth and those with addictions. They run buses several times a day, every day, to Prayer Mountain.

It was a very interesting visit, and one has to marvel at the impact they have had in Korea. Christianity has taken hold there in the past 50 years. Korea has a historic of Buddhist and Confucianist religion but is now about 30% Christian, which is much more than any of it’s neighboring Asian countries. This church has been a significant part of that growth, with about 1 in 20 residents of Seoul belonging to this church. They claim that about 80% of the members tithe, which an amazing difference from the roughly 14% in American evangelical churches. That certainly reflects that this is not just a social gathering!

Despite this impact I admit to still having some reservations about such enormous churches. Clearly they have done things a small church could not do, such as the major daily newspaper and Prayer Mountain. However, they still have needed 150 satellite churches, each with a pastor. It seems more like a denomination than a single church in that regard. Yet, the impact has been great and one has to rejoice at the way they are making a difference in that country!

All Things Kimchi

I have been in Seoul, Korea, the past few days on a business trip, and it has been a very interesting visit. I had never been to Asia before and I am marveling at the both the amazing amount of building and growth going on here as well as at the density of the population in the very large cities like Seoul. Most of Seoul has been built since the Korean war so it is a very new city and it is rather clean and well kept. However, I am beginning to understand how food plays a bigger role in our lives than I had realized.

Kimchi is a traditional Korean food that seems to be present at every meal. While there are supposed to be over 100 kinds of kimchi, the type that seems to show up most often is best described as cabbage soaked in Tabasco sauce. That’s right. Cabbage preserved, or pickled, in hot sauce. If that weren’t enough, many of the main dishes, served with rice or noodles, are also fairly well swimming in hot sauce. I am not talking ‘Taco Bell’ hot, I am talking HOT! Many employers here provide lunch but it is one or two entrée choices plus rice, soup, and kimchi. So far the entrees and the kimchi have always been very, very spicy hot. The good news is that I am not tempted to overeat at lunch!

The people here actually seem to like this stuff. But to us Americans of tender palate, I find myself longing for a hamburger or some other American food when I eat a Korean meal. Oh, and beware anything described as ‘seafood’ on a menu. That seems to mean a mixture of a few shrimp plus a lot of things that would not show up in America. The seafood dishes I have had so far included squid (not those tiny little calamari-type squid, but big honking squid! It has the texture of boiled fire hose generally) and sea cucumber (which might be described as resembling seafood-flavored jello)along with some other things I didn’t ask anyone to identify.
Fortunately the hotel has an enormous breakfast buffet that is wonderful, so I can indulge myself at breakfast and take a banana along with me so that I can make it through lunch just sampling the offerings. This has, however, reminded me of times in the past when I had wondered about the role of food to some people. When I was growing up, for example, I recall my family and extended family reminiscing about certain foods that they had often eaten on the farm growing up and how they missed some of those: things like homemade sausages or my grandmother’s buttermilk biscuits. Those were familiar foods, though, so I could relate. Then when we lived in Massachusetts, one of the men I worked with was from Nigeria. Every month he spent a weekend going to New York city to visit ethnic markets to get African foods that were not available in Pittsfield, MA. Now, I had tasted some of the stuff he brought for lunch and while it was not kimchi it was still pretty awful. Yet, as he put it, ‘I have to have my food’. Put the emphasis in that last statement on ‘my’ food. His own, native food. This was a very personal thing to him, something of utmost importance to his personal well being and happiness.

There is something about being the foreigner, the stranger that makes us ill at ease. Food, I think, drives that home more than a lot of other circumstances. Language does that as well, but here in Korea so many folks speak English that the language issues have touched me less than the food. Foreign food seems to reinforce that I am just passing through, this is not my home.
That is a good reminder for me. C.S. Lewis pointed out, along with many others including the apostle Paul, that God never intended for us to get too comfortable in this world. That ‘settled comfortableness’ ,as Lewis called it, is what we try to achieve here but we will not achieve that until we reach our true home. He never intended us to. Being in a foreign land rather reminds me of that.

As the old hymn says, ‘This world is not my home, I’m just a passin’ through…’; I’m just hoping that we can skip the kimchi in heaven!

Presidential Candidates, CEO's, Lunatics and Sons

When Sarah Palin was announced as the running mate for John McCain there was considerable conversation about her four children and whether she could handle the Vice Presidency and still do justice to her family responsibilities. A few commentators were honest enough to admit that a political career also takes a toll on fathers, though it seems to be more acceptable for fathers to neglect their families than for mothers. Indeed many fathers neglect their families regardless of what kind of career they pursue. Nonetheless, it is very clear that high profile, high consequence jobs like President or Vice President will result in very little time for family life. The result is that most people in those kinds of roles are people I would never want my sons or daughter to be like.



Back in the 90's, in 1997 to be exact, Robert Samuelson wrote a terrific commentary piece in Newsweek about this sort of thing, entitled 'Close to the Lunatic Edge'. The article is mostly about annual reports and what they reveal about the priorities of a company, but at the end he notes that they also tell you something about the people running the company, how they feel entitled to their lavish pay, and how their single-mindedness verges on fanaticism. He quotes Jack Welch of GE saying of CEO's, "You cannot be a moderate, balanced, thoughtful, careful articulator of policy. You've got to be on the lunatic fringe."



Sad but true, in politics as well as business. In any high profile, high power position including major sports coaches, business leaders, politicians and most any other line of work, the people at the very top are borderline lunatics in their singleminded devotion to their career. Most of them are people that you would never want your son or daughter to be like when they grow up. That certainly includes Jack Welch in my opinion. Their lives are unbalanced to the point of absurdity, their families are typically neglected or abandoned, and their egos are most often larger than the great outdoors. I would be hard pressed to think of either a presidential candidate or a CEO that serves as a role example that I would hold up to my children and say, 'Be like him!'. I am speaking here of large company CEOs, as small businesses vary all over the map. Neither Obama nor McCain offer a good role model of what a father should be as far as I can tell.



So, to pick out Sarah Palin for this criticism is very odd but interesting. Pretty much all politicians at the national level have not fulfilled their family responsibilities very well. It does point out that as a society we still expect better things from mothers than from fathers. And I do indeed mean better things, not just different things. To be as unbalanced and unresponsible in so many key areas of life as most large company CEOs and national level politicians are is reprehensible. It would be much better if the only people allowed to run for President were people who did not want the job. That is how it was , or at least appeared to be, with Washington. He was 'drafted'. It has only been true a few times since, as when Truman became President when FDR died. Gerald Ford would be another example. It is interesting that President's Truman and Ford, especially in retrospect, became so well loved by the nation for their role in a job they never wanted. But Ford and Truman were exceptions that resulted from bad circumstances. Too bad we cannot find a way to draft a different kind of candidate every four years.

Health Care, Stealing, and Eating

The blog about health care as a right or a need prompted some discussion, which is good! Part of that discussion turned to a comparison to the 'right to life' via food. We believe in rights to 'life, liberty, and property' in the U.S., so does the right to life mean that if we are poor and hungry that we have to right to take someone else's food? This question is akin to the health care question: if I am poor and sick, do I have the right to expect/demand that someone else pay for my health care?

The Bible sheds some light on this question in regard to food. It is of course one of the Ten Commandments: 'Thou shalt not steal.' Consider also Ephesians 4:28 which says, "Let him who steals steal no longer; but rather let him labor, performing with his own hands what is good, in order that he may have something to share with him who has need." This second passage goes a bit further than just the commandment because it recognizes that there are circumstances that might cause you to be tempted to steal if you have need. Proverbs 30:8-9 gets very explicit about this in this prayer: "Keep deception and lies far from me, Give me neither poverty nor riches; Feed me with the food that is my portion, lest I be full and deny Thee and say, 'Who is the Lord?' Or lest I be in want and steal, and profane the name of my God." This last verse gets to the heart of the matter: even in need, stealing is wrong. It profanes the name of God for his people to steal.

There are a number of other passages that discuss stealing and they all make it clear that stealing is wrong. There are also a number of others, such as Eph 4 above that indicate that it is also good for those with plenty to help those in need so they are not tempted to steal.

One of the things that was new about the Law of Moses when it appeared in the world was its recognition of property rights. This was not a common thing in the ancient world where strength was the primary 'right' to property. The prohibition of stealing is a recognition that the poor do not have a right to someone else's property just because they are poor. Yet, those with plenty still have a moral obligation to help the poor. A moral obligation of the prosperous to help the poor is NOT the same thing as the poor having a right to take the property of someone else (food in this case) just because they are poor.

Of course, as economists will eagerly tell you, property rights are crucial to growing economies. The recognition of property rights ends up feeding far more people than charity does.

The health care question can also be viewed as a matter of property rights: Do those without health care insurance have a right to take someone else's money to pay for their health care? When put this way the answer is pretty obvious: of course not. If it is wrong to steal when you are hungry then it also wrong to 'steal' to pay for your medical bills. This does not mean that the prosperous should not help. It does mean that there is no 'right' to health insurance. We do, of course, already choose to help with health care, in the form of Medicare (for retirees), Medicaid (for the poor), and various state programs (like Peach Care for children in Georgia). The current debate is largely over whether health care insurance should be available to everyone, even those who do not qualify for the current programs, including those that do not meet the current definitions for 'poor'.

Health Care Insurance: Right, Responsibility or Something Else?

At the final pre-election debate this week, Barack Obama proclaimed that health insurance is a right for everyone. That is a 'right' as in 'all men have been endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights' as it was put in the Declaration of Independence. Does that make any sense?


First some history. During the wage and price controls of World War 2, employers were unable to attract the limited supply of workers by offering higher wages so they began to offer paid health insurance instead. It was a form of compensation that got around the wage controls. Up until that time, no one would have imagined health insurance as a right. It was a purchase you could make, like life insurance or any number of other purchases. It became a form of compensation during the war.


Health care service from a provider has always been a purchase, something that you pay for. Health insurance is a way of spreading those purchases over time, leveling the cost. So how does it now become a right? What is a right, anyway?




To me, a right is a freedom that we exercise to pursue our needs and interests. Freedoms have to do with opportunity and are different from things we need. Health care is a need. Health insurance is a means of paying for that need. Freedom to own property (like an insurance policy) is a right.




To turn a need like health care into a right is to destroy the meaning of the word 'rights'. We have a number of basic needs, including food, clothing and shelter. We do not and should not expect the government to provide our food, clothing and shelter normally. We do expect our government to protect our right to own food, clothing and shelter. Providing for us is a very different thing than protecting our rights.





So, while health care services are purchases that we often need, health care is not a right. Our former President FDR did not help us any on this point with his famous Four Freedoms speech in which he declared that freedom from want and freedom from fear are equivalent to freedom of speech and freedom of religion, confounding the rights of speech and religion with needs for food, clothing, shelter, and security. The muddled thinking of Obama is following a long tradition in that regard.





So what is an appropriate view of health care for all? If we as a nation choose to provide health care for all citizens it is as a choice for how we want to pay for health care. It is not a right. It may in fact be charity (as in 'agape', which the King James version of the Bible translates 'charity' and newer versions translate 'love') for the poor among us who cannot afford very much health care. We may as Christians want to do this as a matter of charity/love, but it is not a right. As such, it should be vigorously debated and the costs made clear. The attempt to proclaim it a right is an attempt to short-circuit the debate, deny others the right to disagree, and insist that it is beyond debate. And to force it on us is indeed to violate our rights.



Does that mean that our government welfare system is charity? Yes it does. Government provided health care would also be charity. To provide food, clothing, and shelter through taxation and the government for those who try to provide for themselves but cannot is a good thing to do, but it is still a form of charity.